Review: Phoenix Theatre Presents Sally Jo Bannow's THE BOOB SHOW

The very talented and versatile Sally Jo Bannow has a lot to say about the breast!

Informed by a keen eye for matters cultural, a bundle of superb stage performances, and her experience as a breast cancer survivor, she has committed her reflections about her ordeal and her observations on society's fixation with the prominences through song and vignette in THE BOOB SHOW, an original work developed in collaboration with Craig Bohmler and now premiering at Phoenix Theatre under the direction of Michael Barnard.

There is a powerful theme ~ that defining a woman by the size and shape of her breast is demeaning and destructive ~ that weaves throughout her performance, but it risks getting lost in periodic snarls of distraction, forays into comic shticks, hip hop fist-pumping raps, and highly predictable but trite word plays on boob and mammary.

Bannow is strongest and most engaging in those deeply sensitive and resonant moments where her songs reflect on her bout with cancer: the repeated visits to a doctor who stubbornly misdiagnoses her lump (what she calls her "hitman") as a clogged milk duct; standing before a mirror after her operation, wondering whether this body will still be loved; celebrating the encouragement and exhortations of the "women who came before" to rise above the doubts and body-shaming.

When she gives a righteous finger to the transgressors, she owns the audience. She risks losing that grip when she detours.

Certainly, there's lots of grist for the breast-centric comedy and commentary mill ~ breast-feeding, bra sizes, gravitational pull, how breasts make men stupid, and so forth.

But, one senses what a powerhouse of a one-woman show this would be if it were more focused and streamlined.

The result is a revue that's overlong by an act and loses the traction of its central message.

Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), in a recent NPR interview regarding her latest work, In The Body Of The World, said, "It's been really so interesting to play oneself going through pain, while looking at it at the same time as experiencing it. It almost feels like how we need to be dealing with trauma, in some way - that we go and we revisit it with that third eye, which is protecting us and keeping us safe enough to revisit it and purge it and cleanse it."

Bannow's third eye simply needs to focus ~ and what a wonderful difference that could make.

THE BOOB SHOW runs through March 18th in Phoenix Theatre's Judith Hardes Theatre.

Photo credit to Reg Madison

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